How I Was Discovered: Model Suvi Koponen on her Finnish Next Top Model Start

In this age of boom-and-bust reality TV competitions, the winners often fade into canceled-cable oblivion. But there are exceptions: After model Suvi Koponen won the Finnish modeling show Model School (Mallikoulu) at the age of 16, she went on to open and close Prada’s spring 2007 runway show and appear in ads for both Balenciaga and Calvin Klein Collection. Here, the self-described “awkward girl” from a small town outside Helsinki explains how she not only won a reality competition, but crafted a real career from it.

I grew up in a small town near Helsinki, and I was never really that concerned with television, magazines, or fashion. In school, I was the always the tallest and was almost six feet by the time I was thirteen. I was a little bit of an outsider, and all the boys were a head shorter than me. I was always taller than everyone and never knew I could be anyone—basically I didn’t have high self-esteem.

When I was around 16, I remember looking at fashion magazines and thinking that it was so easy to have a photo taken and how that would be such an amazing job. My friend and I heard about this TV show, Model School (Mallikoulu), from a commercial: You could go to Helsinki and enter this competition. When we got there, they took our photos and made us walk through a door—I think it was just to see how tall we were. Around 30 or 40 girls moved on to the next round. A couple of weeks later, I remember driving back home with my father. I said, “What if I become the next Heidi Klum?” My dad said, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” I don’t think my dad ever thought that I could become a model. My mom comes from a tiny village, there’s just nothing around it. It’s in the middle of the woods. My dad, too. It just didn’t seem like a possibility that their daughter could become a model and travel the world.

The show was kind of like America’s Next Top Model, where we’d have competitions. People would come talk to us about modeling and every few days, a girl would get sent home. I made it to the finals, for which we went to Milan and did some castings. Another girl booked a couple of jobs and I didn’t, so I thought I was never going to win, because this girl was so much more confident than I was—but I won.

Even after I had won the show, it was still a long process for me to become confident. As a teenager, as a kid, and as a girl, there were so many things going on with my body which are hard to comprehend. The show definitely gave me a really good place to start.

I took another year off of high school after that to see what could happen. I was traveling a bit—going to Milan and Paris—but nothing big happened, so I was just going to go back to school. Then I had this realization: I was hanging out with a Finnish girl who I had met in Milan while I was on castings. I was on the train from her place to Helsinki to go back home, and my dad was waiting to pick me up. When I was on this train, all of the sudden, I had this feeling come over me and thought, “I can’t go back to school. There is nothing there for me at this moment in my life—modeling is here now. I need more time.”

I took another year off. I went to New York City, [my agency] sent me to Milan, and in three weeks I was doing Prada. I didn’t find out until the day of the show that I was opening, and I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t understand how monumental it was for a model’s career to be the first one on the catwalk. When the show was over, I started getting all these interview calls, and I was booking all these jobs everywhere. It finally dawned on me that it was a huge deal, to open a big fashion show in the modeling industry.